A lot of my acquaintances from meetups have either left for Europe or the East Coast, specifically New England. My guess is that they find people to be more genuine in both places, compared to here on the West Coast. But especially compared to the Bay Area, since even Los Angeles, long known to be one of the most pretentious, judgemental, superficial places on the planet is now superseded by San Francisco. Even some LA people who live here tell SF people jokingly, “Thanks for being more pretentious than we are. You have that title now.”

It sounds like your extended family on your father’s side ended up similar to the extended family on my mother’s side. My own extended family on my mother’s side often interacted with my grandmother. They often took advantage of her kindness and non-aggressive policy of letting things slide for the sake of peace. They really milked this characteristic, and it probably was a weakness since they took advantage of her for decades, over 50 years even. Similar to how people have taken advantage of me in various ways. She was also kind of the main person with whom to interact. We were just mere sidecars that were related to her. But ever since my grandmother died, it really shows how much interest they have in us (i.e. none). They need someone to pick on, so now obviously since they know that I had turned 30 last October, I am the pariah to pick on—the single, virgin 30 year old who acts more awkward and strange than a fish taken out of water. As I have already effectively severed ties with my father’s extended family, I will probably have to decline all invitations to get-togethers on my mother’s side of the family and sever ties with them as well. I basically have to shut off communication from both extended families. I remember how when my grandmother was alive, they used to ring our house to talk to her. Then my grandmother would report back that they constantly were saying how I had no girlfriend, saying things to her like, “What is wrong with your grandson?”, “My son is 13 and got his first girlfriend. And what happened to your grandson?”, “Does your grandson want a girlfriend?”, “Does your grandson even like girls?”. I honestly see no point in playing this game where I am a figurative punching bag for extended family to do this to me.

The same thing about the class arguments. A lot of my mother’s extended family are in real estate and finance and often berated my mother and her parents (my grandparents) for their working-class background. My grandfather was a fisherman who left school at age 10 and was thus only semi-literate, and my grandmother was a high school graduate who became a factory worker. They often treated all of us like scum just because of this.

This is what I keep doing. I keep feeling terrible comparing myself when I hear other people’s experiences. It is not your fault, it is my own obsession—like when you say that you had your first sexual experience at 19, I think, “When I was 19, I had zero sexual experiences” because no girls wanted to really be with me. One could argue that since I was so engrossed in my studies (I was in the process of completing a double major in mathematics and pre-med molecular biology at that time) and busy in academics, that I never really sought out love or sex or looked for a girlfriend actively. That is true. But it never happened that for example a girl in my class would come up to me to talk. They all left me alone, like some outcast. I was a social and romantic outcast in university. So all throughout university, I never, not even once, got so close as to hand-holding, kissing or anything remotely sexual with my female classmates.

When I hear how you basically did much better than I did, starting at 19, I look at myself now, at age 30, seeing an abject failure of a guy who is so out of the ordinary that no one else has zero sexual experience. I have extremely rarely met a guy who were in my situation. I know of only two guys, both San Francisco natives, from meetups who had admitted to me that they were virgins at 34 and 36, respectively. I do not know if they had kissed girls before. But I know that one of them suffers from severe depression for his situation. I just ruminate, over and over, how can a guy like me get to age 30 and never have even kissed a girl? This is just unbelievably shameful and makes me sick and hate myself. I can feel my heart rate is well over 100 at rest, probably 120, from just thinking about it. I mean, even without the sex, am I that much of a failure that no girl wanted to kiss and hold hands, even for just five minutes?

Personally I do not think that you are ugly. If I want to assuredly call someone ugly, it would be none other than my own self. And to not have a girl say to me something like, “You are cute” or similar, but rather have them say that I am ugly, like that one girl at 17 who told me that I was butt-ugly and that no other girls would ever like me in my whole life, that is the extent of my attention with women in general—just plain negative.

Even though we are both not pleased with how we are positioned in terms of relationships, I cannot help but feel that you are way ahead of me in many ways. You have had at least one relationship and several sexual experiences. I am lacking totally in both areas. I just feel like some plague victim whom no women want to each touch with an iron rod.

I more or less have a good relationship with my mother. I have a rather cold relationship with my father in that we do not really talk. If he says something, it is usually about how I am lacking in some or the other respect. The not having a girlfriend up to now seems to have quite negatively affected his opinion of me. It did not help when I was younger and he used to half-joke, “Do you even like girls?!”. I think that since my 20s he has given up on me and thinks that I will remain single for life. I am basically seen as a failure on whom people give up. True, the Alzheimer’s was rough. I doubt that my grandfather ever knew about how I struggled to get a girlfriend when he was alive. He was essentially mentally gone when I was a teenager, so even if he did, he would most likely forget or not even understand.

About the photo, I have heard so many negative comments in person that I am not sure if one more is going to hurt, because I am at such a low point anyway. Like saturated with negative comments. If you would like to take a look anyway, I could PM you my photo.

My doctor was very concerned for years about my blood pressure. It was around age 25-26 when it went extremely high. When I used to go for check-ups I would get readings of just that—something like 190/90. In some cases over 200 systolic. It was not abnormal to see 210 systolic even. Eventually my doctor, who is female, started to ask if everyone was okay in life. I said that I had stress. That was an understatement. I was too ashamed to tell her straight that I was a single virgin despite not wanting to be so, and that this issue was causing me huge grief to the point of destroying my blood pressure. Also at check-ups I got asked if I were sexually active in order to determine if I needed blood tests for VD. Things like that are always like a punch in the stomach for me. It is like I am missing out on so much. Each time I told my doctor, “No, I never…had..sex”, which always caused me to blush due to my self-hatred and total embarrassment at my situation. Thankfully she never laughed at me, which I expect now anyone to do.

My doctor asked me several times what was bothering me when I was 25-26. I could never tell her, “I feel like shït because I have always been single and never had any sort of sex experience.” So I just told her a vague answer. But she said that if I did not take blood pressure medicine, I could very easily die before age 30 of a big heart attack, especially given that I have bad inheritance of heart problems on both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. My father has already had two heart attacks and various problems with angina and atherosclerosis. My mother has taken hypertension medicine since she was in her mid-30s. My grandmother died of congestive heart failure. Heart problems are not new in my family, and I probably am at risk for all of their problems. If I start to feel dizzy or start getting nosebleeds, it means that my blood pressure is dangerously high, and most likely from the extreme stress.

This hurts me a lot to read:

Later-in-life virgins – ‘At my age, it becomes a red flag’

Then he says,

So today's society regards virginity at 25+ as basically an STI. That is the extent to which people hate virgins?

I feel like this is what awaits me in the future.

I am not sure if it is a miracle that I am alive. I am closing the gap in that I feel so low that it seems as close to my worst when I was 25-26 obsessing about this issue. I have felt down before since I was a child--once when I was 5 I remember telling my mother that sometimes I wished that I did not wake up again. Right now, I feel similar, but much worse. I feel like if I had a massive heart attack in my sleep tonight or the next night or any night, and then died quietly in my sleep, it would be a blessing so that I would not have to feel this torture and feeling of irreparable failure.

I know that a few times on my birthday, since I was born just a few days before my mother’s birthday, my mother has told me that I was her greatest birthday gift. Except I do not feel that way, at all. Sometimes I wish that I had been aborted. It would save me a lot of grief from living 30 years up to the present and feeling like this.